2013-01-30-Travel Apps
Seminars@Hadley
Travel Applications on iDevices
Presented by
Tom Babinszki
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
January 30, 2013
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley Seminars’ team, and I also work in Curricular Affairs and Veterans Outreach at Hadley. Today’s seminar topic is Travel Applications on iDevices. Our presenter today is Tom Babinszki. Tom, besides being my colleague and close friend, is the Director of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship at Hadley. Tom is a veteran and well-seasoned world traveler and brings hands-on experience using these applications to today’s presentation. Today, Tom’s going to give you his perspective on how travel applications can make your journey smother. Now, let me welcome Tom and turn the microphone over to him to get us started. Tom?
Tom Babinszki
Welcome, everybody. Glad to see you here and hopefully a bunch of iPhone and iPad enthusiasts because I have some really interesting, nice, useful and fun things to show you. We’re going to talk about travel apps and that includes essentially everything. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about GPS, but I would like to extend this presentation to everything having to do any segment of your travel before, during and after.
I’m going to take a couple of breaks in the meantime and see if you have any questions and most importantly, I would like to let you know in advance that I will be mentioning a good number of apps, at least fifteen if not more. You don’t need to worry about how to spell it or note everything down correctly. We are going to upload a document together with the recording of this seminar where you will have the name of the different apps that we mention here, and also a link to the AppleVis site where you can get more information about these apps. I’ll talk more about the AppleVis site later, but I just wanted to make sure that you know we will get the app list.
One of the most important things before you start even thinking about any travel apps is that you understand your phone very well, or your iPod - iPad any IUS device that you’re using. Make sure that you can get the information quickly. Sometimes it doesn’t even hurt just to practice some gestures and see how fast you can get to your “appointments today” or “reminders,” and so on and so forth. What I’d like to do is move the most important apps all in the first page on my iPhone so when I turn it on and quickly need to get into anything, the ones that I use on a daily basis are directly on the first screen without any folders, without anything.
There’s a good thing you can do with that, is that you can always move them. You may have business days, you may have work days and you may have weekends and accordingly you may be using different apps. It’s always a good idea to shuffle them around a little bit and get everything on the first page that you think you’ll need in the next couple of days so you can quickly get to it.
It may just come in very hand if you need to call somebody real quick, that’s the airline because you are running late; you need to call a cab; you need to contact a family member. You always want to make sure that information apps that you need to get to is literally at your fingertips.
The other thing that I would recommend is get familiar with any things on your phone or if you have an iPhone older than the iPhone 5.2, the calendar, the reminders and Siri, if you have a newer phone, a 4S or a 5. The reason being is that you’re going to use these apps quite a bit. Siri takes a while to get used to very effectively. It’s not a big deal to say, okay, I know how to use Siri because I can push this button and ask what time it is. Definitely you’re going to get the time as long as you ask in a language that Siri understands; that is the default language that you set in settings. You can set Siri to other languages.
What’s more difficult about Siri is asking more complex questions. Sometimes it has a harder time understanding you and it has nothing to do with your speech. It’s not a perfect application, but it’s definitely getting better and better and it can understand a whole lot. But sometimes you have to repeat it or you need to restructure the question or the command. It’s definitely helpful if you keep your phone or the microphone close to you and speak clearly. You don’t’ need to speak slowly or more slower than you would speak in general, as long as you’re understandable, it’s good.
I would like to share a little tip with you here. I used to have problems with Siri getting the phone number from my contact list, getting a phone number for something that I didn’t have in my contact list, or getting directions. The way it works with Siri is definitely how you phrase the question. If you say, “What’s the closest Apple store?” you’ll get a list of the closest Apple stores and when you tap on them you can get directions. But this is not going to show you the phone number. So, you can ask Siri, “What’s the phone number of the Apple store?” and it will list the same Apple stores around you but when you tap on them you will get the phone number.
But if you say, “Call Apple store,” or “Call the Apple store,” it will try to look for the phone number in your contact list for the Apple store. So, it’s definitely important to be aware of these.
Calendars can get a little complex. I don’t want to spend too much time on how you work them, but it definitely makes sense to be able to move as quickly. If all else fails in the bottom there is a two-day button that can always take you back to your current appointments.
Those are worth noting that you can set up different calendars so you can have your personal appointments; you can have your work-related appointments on different calendars.
When it comes to reminders, there is a not too well-known fact that you can set up lists in reminders. You can have it on the top of the app, and if you have set up different email accounts they may have their own set of reminders on them. Under those you can set up your own list.
This is good because you’re not just dumping a bunch of all kinds of different reminders, but if you set up your list you can create your shopping list, you can creating your todo list, you can create your work-related things and so on and so forth and it will be easier to navigate.
You can also use Siri with reminders and one thing that’s interesting to note is even though Siri is not able to create a list, you have to do it manually, but when you have a list, you can add items to the list and reminders with Siri. For example, “Add taxi to travel list.” If you say that to Siri, “Add taxi to travel list,” if you have previously set up a list called “Travel,” you add an item that’s says, “Taxi” and that’s just going to be a reminder for you.
The other way to add something to reminders with Siri is to say “Remember to.” This way you don’t have to add the time, but you’re just going to add something of importance that you want to remember no matter when.
These are probably some of the most important things that you need when you use your iDevice when you travel. Let’s get to the exciting stuff here.
Before we do that, let me just double check if anybody has any questions or comments?
Jerry Hogue
I didn’t mark question, but this is Jerry Hogue and I have a question.
Tom Babinszki
Yes, go ahead please.
Jerry Hogue
On the reminder you say that I can open “reminder” and create a great travel list and then say create like a phone number list and create a grocery list and then go to each folder and the create something in there like that?
Tom Babinszki
Yes, that’s correct. You don’t actually say that, but Siri doesn’t know how to create a list, so you have to do it manually. But after that you can go to your lists and either add items to it manually or you can add it with Siri.
Larry Muffett
Tom, Deanna has a really good question. She said, “Is there a way to have Siri locate a business and then save the phone number and address to your contact?”
Tom Babinszki
Good question. What I would do is, first locate the business and then you can tap the business and you will be able to add the address to your contacts, or if you pull up the phone number of a business with Siri, you can also add that to contact when you call that number; before or after you call that number. So, practically there is -- it’s necessarily the easiest to work, or most intuitive thing to do, but it’s definitely doable.
And it’s very nice because once you add a business to your contact from then on you can do things with it like, you know, remember to pick up paper towels when I’m in Target, for example. And the next time you’re in Target, you’ll know the address and it will remind you to pick up paper towels.
Okay, then, I would suggest what I would then talk about the apps. There is one thing that you definitely need to know from the very beginning. iPhone and ARS apps are relative new and they will at first don’t necessarily know so much about accessibility as somebody would know who’s developing websites for 10, 15, 20 years.
Consequently, you’re going to find that some apps are not terribly accessible. You will find apps which are absent and not accessible with any technology for blind or visually impaired people and some will be extremely accessible. When I put this list together, I wasn’t looking for the ones which are truly accessible because I probably wouldn’t have too much on the list.
What I was looking for was apps which are very accessible or accessible enough so that you can get around and it will let you choose and you can still use it, or if they’re relatively difficult to access, they are worth the frustration because what you get it really great. I am going to talk about apps here that you would be able to use with any assisted technology.
The other thing is, there are many apps which are similar to one another. So, I tried to pick the best ones or the ones that I like the most, but it doesn’t mean that there is no alternative if you don’t like an app that does something. Most likely, you’re going to find something that will probably the same, that would carry out the same task just as well, but in a different app.
Before you get started on your trip, you probably want figure out where you want to go. There’s a really cool app -- it’s called “Hear Planet” you know, actually, I’m not going to spell the rest of the apps. We’ll just give you the list right after the seminar.
So, Hear Planet is a pretty accessible app. You’ll be able to find everything on it and it helps you find locations and it gives you audio information about a given location. You can check locations nearby or search for anything around the world and read the audio information. Hear Planet is free. It also has a paid version. It has some extra premium content. I’m only using the free version and I’m very happy with. And, by the way, I don’t mind paying for an app if it’s worth it, but there are so many instances where the free is just as good, or even better.
So, once you figure out where you want to travel, you probably want to pick a hotel. Unfortunately, I have not found a very good an accessible app to make a hotel booking. I have found www.hotels.com which is possible to use. I found that it a little difficult and slightly annoying from the accessibility standpoint, but you can get to hotels, you can pull up your destinations and you can read the hotel reviews, make the reservation and pay with your credit card on the phone.
Once you’ve made your hotel reservation, it’s time to get to your destination. Once I took a railroad trip and I loved it, so I looked up Amtrak to see if they came up with an app, and sure enough, there is an app for everything including Amtrak schedules. It’s going to be slightly tricky. When you look up a schedule you’ll find that there isn’t an option to purchase that ticket when you find the schedule. So, the way you go around it if you want to actually purchase the ticket, is start with “purchase ticket” and then you will have the option of viewing the schedule of what you want to purchase and you can decide which train you want and which category.
Another way to get places is airlines. I have not checked every airline, but a good number of them, and I’m finding that at least most airlines have their own apps. Personally, I use United if I make a booking on my phone. It’s very clear, very accessible. United allows you to do electronic check-in by just putting your confirmation number and you’re checked in right away. You can send your boarding pass onto passbook which is the iPhone’s collection of the different cards and passes that you have, or with United you can also send yourself an email or they can send you a link in an email that you can click and your boarding pass will be in a browser or you can do the same thing in a text message.
Recently, I started using electronic boarding passes the last several trips I’ve taken and I just love it. It’s just so great that I don’t need to stand in line that much, I don’t need to deal with paper, I can just carry it on my phone. One trick that you may want to know is, you know, when many of use the phone with brightness turned down and the screen curtain on to save battery life, when you turn off the screen curtain, but you still have the brightness down to zero, the technology at the airports cannot read your electronic boarding passes. So, what you want to make sure of is that before you go to the airport, go to “settings,” find “brightness” and crank up “brightness” to approximately 50%. You can still put your screen curtain on and have a totally dim screen, but you can just turn off the screen curtain when they want to look at your boarding pass. And obviously after that, don’t forget to turn the brightness down so that you can use the battery for the rest of the day, especially if you have a long trip ahead of you.